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The Sustainability of Agriculture

Agriculture is the most important activity on this planet as far as survival is concerned and recent reports have attributed most greenhouse gas emissions to Ag given ‘Approximately 37,000,000 hectares (91,000,000 acres) worldwide are now farmed organically, representing approximately 1% of total world farmland (2009) (see Willer/Kilcher 2011)’ Wikipedia. The rest 99% use toxic chemicalsmanufactured from oil, natural gas and God-knows-what else in the guise of herbicides, insecticides, growth hormones leading to cancer, allergies, sterility, infertility, insanity, vanity I tell you!

There is hope though…thanks to sustainable agriculture; organic farming and the principles around urban farming, hydroponics, aquaponics, greenhouse tech, irrigation, water desalination, agroecology…Yes we can go green with agriculture but first we need to spread information about the risks of the current method of agriculture which I call chemical farming.

The Risks of Chemical Conventional Farming

Last weekend we went for a trip to Central Kenya highlands, Murang’s, Kangema to be exact and I had the privileged to see organic coffee bushes flowering. Growing up in Doonholm, you don’t get to see this often so I was very astounded. On the next farm the coffee bushes were not doing so well and after taking a closer look I saw traces of white chemicals which is the reason why they were not flowering when they ought to naturally.

If you use X litres of toxic chemicals on your land this growing season, you will be forced to use X*2 toxic chemicals the next growing season and it goes on and on until your land is unproductive no more forcing you to buy food that you could have grown yourself and of course your land value depreciates since it is unproductive.

Organic farming is the most sustainable agriculture that can be practised on the same land for millennia, like what our ancestors used to farm. Of course today we are more scientifically intelligent and if we use modern day science together with our forefathers style of farming, we can feed the Globe’s 7 Billion even 10 billion would not be a problem if we go green with ag.

As we blog, Kenya is suffering shortage of fertilizer and most farmers believe that you need fossil-based fertilizers but the organic farmer just needs animal and plant waste and we are good to go. We even make our home made organic fertilizer at home